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IN RETAIL NEWS… *COLLAB EDITION* Babies ‘R’ Us is expanding! 👶🏻👶🏼 Kohl's is set to introduce Babies"R"Us shops in around 200 of its stores across the U.S. this fall, following a licensing agreement with brand management firm WHP Global. The stores, ranging from 750 to 2,500 square feet, will offer baby gear, furniture, and more. Kohl's aims to attract foot traffic and younger shoppers by expanding its merchandise offerings. The move aligns with Kohl's strategy to create a more relevant mix of merchandise and appeal to a broader customer base. The addition of Babies R Us shops follows Kohl's successful collaboration with SEPHORA bringing beauty shops to hundreds of its stores. The retailer reported topping Wall Street's holiday-quarter expectations for earnings and revenue, despite a 1.1% decline in net sales and a 4.3% drop in comparable sales. Interesting to see if this bolsters Kohl’s overall traffic and business. CNBC with the full story https://lnkd.in/eRF-9-6Y *** #Retail #BabiesRUs #Kohls #Stores #Collaborations #Business

Here are some interesting stories from the world of retail for Saturday, June 15: 📦 Kohl's is introducing a Return Drop service to stores nationwide: in addition to its Amazon partnership, the department store will now accept returns from brands like Carhartt, Hanes and Levi’s. 🎯 Target's total US retail market share, including online and store sales, has shrunk in categories that generate over 60% of its revenue. An indication the chain needs to work harder to retain customers. 👖 Superdry has avoided insolvency after shareholders voted to approve a £10m equity raise underwritten by chief executive Julian Dunkerton. The fashion brand said the deal provides enough liquidity of a turnaround. 👚 Secondhand apparel marketplace ThredUp is continuing to experiment with charging sellers a fee to send in items, as part of a strategy to fill its marketplace with higher-quality items. 5️⃣ Five Below’s net sales surpassed $3.5 billion in 2023, more than double five years ago. Despite an impressive few years of growth, things have taken a turn for the worse in 2024 and stock fell to a year low in the first week of June. 👗 Torrid CEO Lisa Harper said during an earnings call that the company is evaluating its brick-and-mortar footprint and wants to move to a 50-50 split between mall-based and non-mall locations in the future. 🕹️ Over the past two years, Hasbro has suffered from weaker toy demand, leading to layoffs and declining sales. But analysts at BofA said Wall Street hasn’t appreciated the potential of the toy maker’s digital-gaming business. ⛽️ Exactly two years ago Friday, gasoline prices peaked at a record of $5.02 a gallon nationally. Gas prices today are not cheap – but they are miles away from that point with the he national average for regular gas at $3.46 a gallon. 🚙 Advance Auto Parts said a hacker had accessed and was selling certain data that may contain Social Security numbers of job applicants and employees. 📉 US consumer sentiment fell for the third consecutive month in June, as Americans expressed concerns about their finances and persistent inflation, as per a University of Michigan survey. 🚫 SHEIN has unexpectedly canceled its upcoming pop-up store in Perth, Australia, scheduled for June 21 at Lakeside Joondalup Shopping Centre, just weeks before a new tax on fast fashion items takes effect. 🇶🇦 With Eid al-Adha approaching, retailers in Qatar are offering a wide range of promotions and discounts to attract shoppers. Discounts of up to 50% are being offered on clothing, shoes, accessories, and watches. 🏬 Thai retailer Central Group has agreed to acquire the remaining assets of KaDeWe Group, a chain of landmark department stores in Germany. 🐖 American hog farmers are betting on cash-strapped consumers to drive demand for pork as beef prices surge. #retail #retailnews #economy #DailyRetailNews

🚼 Baby on Board: Kohls Retail Partnership Kohl's, the department store chain giant, has announced a strategic collaboration with Babies “R” Us to enhance its store-in-store offerings. Alongside its fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2023 financial results released earlier today (March 12th), the company revealed plans to partner with the #baby retailer. This partnership entails opening 750-2,500-square-foot shops inside Kohl’s stores and offering Babies “R” Us products for sale #online. Beyond these store-in-store initiatives, Kohl’s is intensifying its efforts to enhance the on-site shopping experience. This includes repositioning store layouts, #optimizing product displays, and introducing new brands to create a more engaging and relevant environment for its customers. These strategic moves come at a pivotal time as the #digital experiences took a downturn, with the brand's eCommerce business seeing a 10% decrease in the quarter. #retail #BigBrands #UPSCapital #InsureShield #DeliveryDefense

Here are some interesting stories from the world of retail for Thursday, May 30: 👖 Shares of Abercrombie & Fitch Co. continued their record run after the apparel retailer reported another quarterly earnings beat and raised its sales growth outlook, amid continued strength in the Abercrombie brand. 🏀 DICK'S Sporting Goods kicked off the year with net sales of more than $3 billion in Q1, an increase of 6.2%. Comparable sales in the quarter grew 5.3%, on top of 3.6% growth the year prior. 🦅 American Eagle said it’s making gains in boosting profitability as it works to improve its product assortment and tweak operations. Still, its fiscal first-quarter sales came in weaker than Wall Street expected. 🐹 Chewy smashed earnings estimates for its fiscal first quarter on Wednesday, announced its first share buyback program and signaled a recovering pet market. 🌳 Dollar Tree Stores announced it has acquired leases for 170 of 99 Cents Only Stores stores out of bankruptcy in Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas. Dollar Tree will reopen these stores with its own products under its brand. 🥾 Dr. Martens plc has announced a swathe of cost-cutting plans, after the bootmaker’s bottom line was hit by plummeting demand in the US last year. The London-listed firm hopes to save up to £25m in the coming financial year. 🏥 Walgreens said it will slash prices on 1,300 items across its drugstores — the latest big retailer to enact discounts as consumers grow increasingly picky about where they shop in an era of stubbornly high inflation. 🐶 Petco names a new chief stores officer as the COO exits. The pet retailer said it eliminated its chief merchandising and supply chain officer role and named five people to its executive leadership team. 👟Italian luxury sneaker brand Golden Goose, which was valued at €1.3bn when acquired by Perimia in 2020, said on Thursday it aims to list on Milan's Euronext next month. 💵 Cash register outages and internal system failures at Walmart have led to widespread mispricing, with customers being overcharged for certain items. The technical issues on March 19th affected 1,600 stores. 🌭 Americans are now prepared to spend nearly $6 for a hot dog. The summertime classic has climbed in price by 7.1% during the past year, according to the latest government figures. 🍔 A top McDonald's executive on Wednesday decried poorly sourced reports that the fast-food giant has hiked its prices faster than inflation. He also noted that an $18 Big Mac meal is exception not the rule. 💳 Visa and Mastercard have agreed to pay $197m to resolve a class action by millions of consumers accusing the financial payment companies of keeping cash access fees artificially high. 🍪 Subway’s footlong cookie is back. Following a four-month long disappearance, Subway announced Wednesday the “triumphant return” of the oversized chocolate chip cookie. #retail #retailnews #economy #DailyRetailNews

🪖In the retail battleground, mid-market department stores like Macy's, Kohl's, and Nordstrom face a stark choice: evolve or fade away. 🔄 With the threat from online behemoths and fast fashion's allure, it's clear that innovation alone won't cut it. The real game-changer? A unique, exclusive product mix that can draw shoppers back into their hallowed halls. 🛍️ As they strategize to reinvent their value proposition, one truth stands out: in the world of retail, the right products aren't just an option—they're survival. 🎯 #RetailRevolution #DepartmentStores #ProductIsKing

Kohl's recently announced a strategic partnership with Babies R Us to open shop-in-shops within Kohl's stores. This move aims to attract new customer segments, enhance the in-store experience, and increase foot traffic. However, with customer traffic down and stores struggling to define their identity, it's uncertain whether this partnership will be enough to turn things around. While leveraging the strength of the Babies "R" Us brand might help, the success of this initiative will depend on how well Kohl's can execute the integration and improve the overall shopping experience. This strategy could either be a step towards revitalization or just another attempt to stay afloat in a challenging retail environment. Time will tell if these partnerships can truly improve Kohl's business or if they are grasping to find their identity. Kohl's seems to be following their success with SEPHORA shop within shops but its unclear if that strategy is driving the brand for success! #StrategicPartnerships #CustomerExperience #RetailStrategy #ShopInShop #RetailRevival #Kohls #BabiesRUs

Despite efforts to close unprofitable stores and innovate, department stores continue to lose customers to online giants like Amazon, agile newcomers like Shein, and budget-friendly off-price retailers such as TJ Maxx. The blunt truth is that most department stores are neither great value for money nor super premium — this makes them very easy to overlook and avoid. They've essentially put themselves in the firing line. To survive, traditional players like Macy's, Kohl's and Nordstrom must, among other things, rethink their entire value proposition by offering unique, fairly priced, and exclusive items that can’t be easily found online. Thanks to The Business of Fashion for including my thoughts in this interesting article on how to save department stores... #retail #retailnews #departmentstores #apparel https://lnkd.in/e2f7fxTp

Will Kohl's benefit from its latest third-party venture with Babies"R"Us? On the plus side, adding Babies R Us is more of a help than a hinderance to Kohl's. It bolsters the proposition in an important area of the market and gives Kohl’s more credibility in the space. This should help drive some incremental revenue into the business. There is also a view that if Kohl’s can pull in younger family and family formation shoppers for baby products it can, hopefully, convert them into buying other categories like toys or homewares.    However, for this to work properly, Kohl’s really needs to improve the look and feel of its stores and make its own assortments and pricing more compelling. If it fails to tackle these things, this will be a reasonable venture but one that cannot throw a halo over the rest of the business – much as has been the case with Sephora.   The bottom line is that Kohl’s can add in as many third-party brands and ventures as it wants, but there is a tactic admission here that its own core proposition isn’t good enough. It still needs to work to dispel this view. Great to chat with Inside Retail US about this, link to article in comments. #retail #retailnews #departmentstores #babies #parents

INNOVATION WON'T SAVE DEPARTMENT STORES. THE RIGHT PRODUCT WILL The Business of Fashion: Mid-market American department stores like Macy's’s, Kohl's’s and Nordstrom need more than new owners and retail formats to win back customers; they must reinvent their entire value proposition with a selection that can compete with online fast fashion and off-price players. Time is running out. KEY INSIGHTS 🍉 Despite efforts to close unprofitable stores and innovate, department stores continue to lose customers to online giants like Amazon, agile newcomers like Shein, and budget-friendly off-price retailers such as TJ Maxx. 🥝 To survive, these retailers must rethink their entire value proposition by offering unique, fairly priced, and exclusive items that can’t be easily found online. 🥞 Despite challenges, their physical presence remains an advantage. For Terry Lundgren, a former CEO of Macy’s, talk of the possible extinction of department stores is a tale as old as time. Lundgren joined the company, then known as Federated Department Stores, nearly 50 years ago right out of college, his first choice out of a dozen job offers. His roommate could not believe him. “He said, ‘Aren’t they going to be going out of business?’” Lundgren recalls. “Back then, it was because catalogues were emerging and he thought, ‘Well, isn’t everybody just going to read catalogues and shop that way?’” Macy’s survived the catalogue scare, and countless other evolutions in how Americans shopped, from QVC to the rise of e-commerce. But there’s something different today about the cocktail of threats facing Macy’s and other department stores that cater to the middle class, including Kohl’s and Nordstrom. No matter how many unprofitable stores they close or innovative retail concepts they try, they keep losing customers, whether to historic online threats like Amazon, newer, more nimble competitors like Shein or off-price stalwarts including TJ Maxx that are better geared towards stretched household budgets. explore more: https://lnkd.in/g5adBm48 #retail #fashion #ai #investmeent #crisis

Kohl's – what do you stand for? First Amazon, then SEPHORA, and now Babies"R"Us? Kohl’s has been diluted. The modge podge of brands, including private labels, and shops within shops need to be cleaned up. The message is no longer clear. The middle class once went to you for fashion at a value for the whole family. Compelling curated collections telling her what she had to buy for every member. The assortment is no longer there. The service is no longer there. I’ve been greeted by employees giving me the up and down as I walk in to make my Amazon returns (and leave buying nothing) my last several trips. You have given families reasons to go to Amazon, Target, and The TJX Companies, Inc. Target has the fashion and quality at a value, and well, Amazon and TJX have the price. Large square footage stores with an abundance of stuff are no longer the answer. What are the top 20 brands within apparel doing most of the work? Focus and double down. Baby is an interesting category to focus on since Buy Buy Baby is no longer the 137 stores it used to be, but the hard work won’t help if everything else isn’t cleaned up. Stats: 💵Q4 net sales fell 1.1% 💵Net income grew to $186M from a loss of $273 the year prior 💵Compared to pre-COVID 2019, sales were down 12.7% #retail #baby #fashion #stores #service #experience